The present invention pertains generally to telecommunications and, more particularly, to a system for prevalidating orders with a local exchange carrier.
Inter exchange carriers, such as MCI, that provide long-distance service to customers, frequently place access service requests with local exchange carriers to establish voice and data connections. Hence, the inter exchange carriers, such as MCI, have to deal with a number of different local exchange carriers that provide the local service for these customers. Typically, the local exchange carrier will make certain services available to business customers within the LEC""s service area. For example, a LEC may provide a certain number of T1, T3, OC-48, etc. services that are provided between the customer and the LEC central office.
The business customer may wish to either activate or deactivate its voice and data services as business needs either increase or decrease, respectively. For example, if a business customer desires to increase its service, a representative of the business customer will normally contact its inter exchange carrier by phone and make a request for the additional service. The provisioner (order taker) located at the inter exchange carrier takes the request from the business customer. The provisioner then processes the request on a prevalidation system. The prevalidation system allows the inter exchange carrier to access the database of the applicable LEC to determine the availability of channels for the requested service. In other words, the prevalidation system obtains the circuit identification for the channels that are to be provided by the LEC to fulfill the service order.
Upon receiving this information from the LEC database, the provisioner then enters access service requests (ASRs) using a separate ordering system. The provisioner performs this task by keyboarding all of the detailed information regarding circuit ID""s, service locations, service requests and other detailed information into an ASR ordering system. In the process of performing this task, errors can be easily made by the provisioner. Further, other provisioners of the inter exchange carrier may have also received requests from other representatives of the same business customer at approximately the same time which could result in the duplicate assignment of the same circuit IDs. However, the primary concerns of the inter exchange carrier are that this type of dual system of prevalidation and rekeying of data into an automatic service request system are
(1) the time delay in placing the order, and
(2) the costs and delays associated with the necessity to generate supplemental orders whenever the LEC rejects the service request.
A great deal of effort must be expended in entering the detailed and extensive information of an automatic service request. Very often, the provisioners become very busy and are unable to prepare the service request immediately after it is requested by the business customer. Further, the inherent delays in placing an incorrect order, having that order rejected and preparing a supplemental order can be costly to the inter exchange carrier. Such a process of submitting a supplemental order may result in several days of delay. Additionally, it costs the LEC time and money for the provisioner to prepare and submit the supplemental order.
Although prevalidation systems have been very effective in reducing the costs associated with submitting supplemental orders as a result of mistakes in service orders, it would be advantageous to provide a system that further eliminates errors that can occur in the actual ordering process and to provide an integrated system that can automatically prevalidate orders as part of the process of placing an order.
Further, it would be advantageous to provide a system that is capable of generating reports that are useful in analyzing errors that have been made by the LEC. For example, in an integrated system that automatically prevalidates orders as part of the process for placing an order, a rejected acknowledgment may be received from the LEC. Since the service order was prevalidated just prior to placing the order, a rejected acknowledgment should not have been received. It would therefore be advantageous to generate reports that audit these types of error produced by the LEC so that credit can be obtained for charges on supplemental orders that are necessitated by the rejected order acknowledgment.
The present invention overcomes the disadvantages and limitations of the prior art by providing a system that is capable of generating reports indicating errors made by the LEC and that may be used for auditing LEC charges.
The present invention may therefore comprise a method of auditing an integrated prevalidation and ordering system in which service orders are placed by an inter exchange carrier with local exchange carrier comprising: obtaining prevalidation responses and service order acknowledgments in response to generation of a service order on the integrated revalidation and ordering system; generating a file of the prevalidation responses and service order acknowledgments for each service order that has a rejected acknowledgment and an accepted prevalidation response; using said file to audit charges incurred by the inter exchange carrier for the service orders.
The present invention may further comprise a system for auditing charges incurred by an inter exchange carrier for supplemental orders necessitated by rejected acknowledgments of a service order that received an accepted prevalidation response in an integrated prevalidation and order system comprising: a prevalidation system that generates prevalidation requests and receives prevalidation responses in response to preparation of a service order in an integrated prevalidation and ordering system; an ordering system connected to the prevalidation system and a local exchange carrier that generates a file of accepted prevalidation responses and rejected service order acknowledgments, and generates a report from the file to audit the charges incurred by the inter exchange carrier.
The advantages of the present system are that prevalidation requests can be made automatically as part of an ordering system since the prevalidation ordering system and the ordering system are integrated into a single system that utilizes at least a portion of the same data. In this fashion, the need to reenter data into the ordering system that has already been entered into the prevalidation system is eliminated. Errors that can potentially occur upon reentering data are avoided. Further, delays and costs associated with preparation and submittal of supplemental orders can be substantially eliminated.